Midnight Century, 2011 edition

I rode down to The Elk on Saturday night for the Midnight Century. Wow, what a turnout! John counted 38 starters, and even more remarkably, it appears that at least 34 of them finished! I'm really impressed, folks... that's a daunting course overall. The first 25 miles are just there to lure you in ;)

This year, I didn't get nearly as much training in, so I was about 6-8 pounds over my "raceday" weight and felt feeble. Where's my leg strength gone...? Maybe I'm just getting old. :( But now the course is familiar, the weather was perfect, and my bike was set up really well for this ride, so I just pressed on, resolving not to overdo it.

We started at 11:59PM. I thought it would be cool to beat the official sunrise time of 5:34AM, but between painting smiley-faces and direction arrows with spray chalk, and stopping to fix a problem with one of my lights, I had too much off-the-bike time to hit that target, and came in 11 minutes after sunrise. Here's the Garmin's results.

My vision was flickering, a sure sign I was reaching my endurance limits. I soft-pedalled home and discovered a shortcoming in my MC planning: recovery food! I had only two pieces of bread left, so I made a fat peanut-butter & honey sandwich and guzzled the last of my chocolate milk, plus a Powerbar and a bowl of cereal. After a soak in the tub and a nap, I rode down to the store and rectified the food situation: ice cream... cookies... ooo, pizza! And more chocolate milk. There, that oughta do it. :)